Sharpmeter

It is freezing here and I still do not have the slightest inclination to do something useful. But I need to heat the workshop occasionally to prevent it from completely freezing. Not that it would be super bad, except that maybe ice forming in the cooling receptacle near the grinder could damage it. Anyhoo, yesterday was a workshop heating day. I could not do anything super useful – it took me hours to raise the temperature to a bearable level and soon after I stopped feeding the stove, the temperature got down quickly again. But I could use the time to do something small and simple so I have made a device for measuring knife sharpness (I did not invent the concept, I saw the principle somewhere on the interwebs sometime ago).

It is simple and consists of two main parts. One part is a board with four legs and a 35 mm hole in the middle. A tiny table that can be put over my kitchen scales.

The second part is a small wooden cylinder with a cutout and two screws on each side of it.

I can span a thin thread between the two screws and when the cylinder is put on the scale through the hole in the middle of the tiny table, I can cut the thread safely for me, the scale, and the furniture.

The main downside is that my kitchen scale does not have a “Hold” or “Max” function so the measured values are not super precise. Another problem is the used thread – a very thin fishing line would be probably better since this one has a tendency to get damaged during spanning. Or perhaps a very thin copper wire – I might try to extract some strands from leftovers from speaker or ethernet cables. But when being very careful with spanning the thread and doing the cut slowly and carefully, the setup gives useable results and I did learn some things.

Here is a boxplot of 10 measurements with the three cutting implements in the photos – a fresh razor blade, a paper-cutting-but-not-shaving-sharp sharp knife, and a blunt table knife (I used the non-serrated part which is about 1 mm thick),

The razor had an average cutting force of ~6 g, the sharp-ish knife ~60 g, and the blunt knife ~ 1000 g. The less sharp the blade the bigger the spread but even with sometimes ridiculous outliers, there is a definitive and statistically significant difference between these three and it does give me some information and opens future opportunities. I would like for example to examine the relationship between sharpness and sharpening angle, to get some hard data to back up my opinion that anything between 10-30° works just fine. My prediction is that the relationship is not linear and as the angle gets steeper, the cutting ability gets exponentially worse.

I did learn one thing – my “Not a Masterpiece” was sharpened at a 20° angle and the only knife that actually scares me – the bigger knife from the two-knife applewood set – was sharpened at 15°, yet both measured within the same range as the razor. Although the applewood knife completely failed to register on the scale one time, thus my suspicion that it is the sharpest knife I made so far might be true.

Of course this only tests edge geometry, not blade geometry. I could use a similar setup to test the influence of blade geometry on cutting force too, but I do not have a reliable medium to do so yet. All things that I have thought of so far are either expensive (cork, rubber, silicone) or have highly inconsistent properties (fruit & veggies). But maybe I will think of something to test blade gomtry too.

An Experimentental Knife Set

A friend gave me in the spring some cherry wood from a tree that died and dried standing up in their garden. That means the wood has many cracks, some fungus damage, and discolorations. And she asked for a kitchen knife for herself as her primary cooking knife. The type of blade that she requested would be more of a fish-gutting knife for me, but she has her own cutting style and I am not a knife snob to sneer at someone’s cutting technique. If one is not cutting their fingers off, the main thing is that they get the ingredients down to size and to each their own I say.

I got to work but I got distracted several times. Firstly, when I was cutting the steel, I got a small offcut that just lent itself to be made into a small peeling knife matching the one ordered. Secondly, when I was selecting the wood for the handles, I found one piece that was big enough for both handles and a bloc. And thirdly, when I was pondering making legs for the bloc I got an idea to try to make a foldable leg, so I tested it. Having a lot of problems to deal with makes me extremely prone to such distractions. It is a bad habit.

The knives have very simple rectangular handles that are nevertheless comfortable to hold. The blades are N690 steel, without ricasso, tumbled. The numbering on the smaller knife is a bit unreadable, but such is life. Bolsters and end caps are from buffalo horn. I made them thin because she expressed a wish for the wood to be the dominant design feature.

The wood grain and cracks in the handles match that in the bloc. This is exactly why I have used this particular piece of wood, it had just the right size for this. The wood has fairly small pores and is not overly decomposed so trying to infuse it with resin would be an exercise in futility, thus I only coated it with three layers of resin, sanded it with 800 grit, and then I buffed it with home-made silica-based buffing compound.

The foldable leg is bent from an old knitting needle. The holes in the sides of the bloc are offset so the leg has two stable-ish positions. It is just a gimmick that won’t probably see much use but it would make packing the knives for travel easier if one were inclined or in need of to take their cooking knives with them on travels. But mainly I wanted to try to make it.

If she accepts these, I will actually only charge for the bigger knife since that is all that was agreed upon. The small knife and the bloc she will get together with her husband as a belated wedding gift.

Another Overabladeance

I was spending way too little time actually making knives this year since I spend two-three days a week carting my parents to and from various doctor appointments. And when finishing this batch, my new tumbling receptacles did not work with this particular type of blades and I had to modify them significantly. However, I do have now thirteen finished blades, eleven tumbled from N690, and two from spring steel, mirror-polished with hamon.

Four kitchen knife sets three three-piece and one two-piece. You might notice that this time I went for blades without ricasso. The reasons are several but the main one is that such blades are significantly easier to make. Really significantly easier. They turned out well and I must say there is something satisfying about getting two chef-knife blades so flat that they stick together when wet. They are probably flat to within a few hundredths of a mm.

The two-piece set in the lower left corner is actually a half-commission. A friend of mine has ordered the bigger blade and I have decided to make the smaller one from an offcut to accompany it. I will also make a bloc as a belated wedding gift. To be fair, I could not give them a proper wedding gift on time since they kept the wedding secret, so it is not that I was inconsiderate, just ignorant.

From now on, I will for several months only dress blades. I still did not finish all of last year’s Overabladeance. The two Puuko I made still have no sheaths. I only started to make these blades because of the commissioned machete in the summer and the commissioned kitchen knife from my friend – I needed a sufficient amount of blades to fill the tumbler and not waste the forge heat. For both things, ten blades is a minimum. So actually I might make some blades again – if I get a commission.

A Commision With a Point

I hope the customer will accept this, I am not completely happy with the result. An acquaintance of mine has given me some deer antlers for crafting and she also commissioned a knife made out of one of them. The antlers are from her father, who is a gamekeeper and she wants to have something to remember him by. She requested a small letter opener with a stand that can also work as a paperweight. Lenticular grind and not fully sharpened edges. Oak wood for the stand because her office has oaken furniture.

From the manufacturing point of view, there were not very many interesting things – I ground and polished the blade and blackened it with oak bark, then I fixed it to half of the antler with the burr at the pommel end. Because the antler is old, scratched, and irregular – as antlers are – I have hammered the pakfong pommel into an irregular shape. I also hammered the bolster and I only wire-brushed and polished them over the hammer marks. A bit interesting was the making of the stand.

To weigh it down, I chiseled holes in the bigger piece of wood before gluing it together and I poured molten solder into it.

I learned this technique from my maternal grandfather. I have never met him – he died long before my parents even met – but he made for my grandmother a top for winding the thread on bobbins and the top has been weighed this way on its circumference. Molten solder cools in wood quite quickly and it does not char the wood on the edges all that much, especially if it is hard and dense wood. I was itching to try this out for years.

The pakfong throat on the stand for the blade was a bit difficult to make and there I had to use a creative solution to make it hopefully solid enough so it does not become undone in a breeze. I did not want to rely only on epoxy, so I soldered two pieces of copper wire onto the pakfong piece, and I glued those into tight-fitting holes. This way it should hopefully withstand even some mild abuse like falling on the ground.

The full finished set weighs about 860 g, I have possibly overdone the weighing a bit. The stand is slightly decorated with pokerwork and the underside is covered with brown natural felt so it does not click when put on a table. The finish is tung oil and beeswax, which are more pleasant to the touch than lacquer or epoxy.

Crafting Perk Unlocked – Hamon

When making the commissioned machete in the summer, I had enuff steel left for one additional blade and two more blanks lying around made from the same steel, thus I decided to try my hand at making a blade with hamon again. So far, I have succeeded only once, with a “mystery” stainless steel, and I had to cheat by carbonitriding it for several hours at ca 500°C. The 54SiCr6 is 0,5% carbon steel, which is not ideal for hamon. 1-1,5% carbon would be better. But I decided to try it nevertheless because if I fail, I can (usually) always harden the whole thing.

Well, I did fail in multiple ways – from three quenched blades, one had to be tossed completely, one I damaged because of unforeseen circumstances, and one turned out OK. This is better than my previous attempts and I think I have a working process now for making blades with hamon. Here is how I did it.

First the used materials – three blade blanks ground with 40 grit. I went for three different geometries to see what happens. A sample size of 1 per geometry is of course not very indicative of anything, but it is better than nothing. On the left is a bottle of liquid glass, a water solution of sodium silicate, a chemical that is sold cheaply in CZ and is used to waterproof cement, make cement go harden faster, and as a binder for heat-resistant cement. Then there is a receptacle with perlite, which I have bought in huge amounts for use both in my gardening and knife-making endeavors. And the last ingredient is fine-sieved dirt from my garden taken from deep below the topsoil – I have a heap of this too from the building of my sewage cleaning facility.

The first step was to cover the blades with a thin layer of just the liquid glass mixed with some clay and sprinkle some more clay on top of that to soak up excess liquid glass and prevent cracking of the layer when drying it with a heat gun (a torch and charcoal fire work both too as I found out later).

Here you see the various phases of the second step, which consisted of adding several layers of perlite. For this, I have used the mixture of liquid glass and dirt again, but I have sprinkled it with perlite. The liquid glass serves as a binder, the clay as a filler to prevent cracking, and the perlite as an insulator. I dried the added layer with a heat gun again and I continued to add these layers until I had about 1 cm thick insulating layer on each blade. To finish it off I have added one more layer of liquid glass and dirt only to make a hard shell that holds it all together.

Initially, I went for three different hamon lines, but unfortunately, this did not work out. After I quenched the machete and one of these blades (I forgot which one) without problems, I had trouble reaching the required temperature again because the coals got smaller and the blown air did not reach under the uppermost layer anymore. So first quench was unsuccessful on two blades, I had to cover them again and try to quench them again. This time I was using the charcoal fire to quickly dry the successive layers and it worked well. Next time I am preparing blades for hardening this way, I will probably combine it with BBQ dinner, combining pleasant and useful.

As I already mentioned, two of these unfortunately failed.

The first fail was the blade with a fuller – it cracked near the ricasso. That is always a risk with hardening steel and it is higher with this method it happens even to masters of this craft because the blades must be quenched in water which is more stressful than oil. So while I am not happy about having to toss the blade, I do not beat myself over the head over it either.

The second fail is the drop-point blade. And I am beating myself over the head about it because this is completely my screw-up. I have read books, internet articles and watched videos about how blades with hamon are made, but I do not remember anyone ever mentioning that a peculiar thing can happen when the hamon line is parallel with the edge – the steel has developed lengthwise stripes that when polished, look under certain light conditions and from certain angles like lengthwise scratches made with low-grit sandpaper. I have ground the blade very thin trying to grind these phantom scratches out, I messed up the grind completely at the end near the ricasso and I had to remove the ricasso and shorten the blade to “save it”.

Here you can see it finished. It is still a blade suitable for small outdoor/hunting skinner knife. Maybe. I will think about it and maybe try to make a suitable handle for it. But I do not like blades without ricasso, not only for aesthetic reasons but also because that way the tang actually really is way too thin for comfort near the handle. But I have finished polishing it because I needed to find out the best finishing method on it before finishing the only successful blade. Btw. it still has those phantom scratches near the tang where the hamon is close to the cutting edge. They drive me crazy.

The best polishing process was pretty standard although very laborious. From 320 grit up I have inserted hand-polishing after each belt-grinder step, removing the angled belt-grinder scratches with lengthwise ones. This leads to very smooth and very flat surfaces and crisp lines and ridges. From 2500 grit upwards it was only hand polishing and only lengthwise. Here you can see the result at 5000 grit, which is the phase at which I left the workshop and went indoors. I have tried buffing the failed blade with buffing wheels and commercial buffing compound but this has led to an interesting effect – the hamon went completely invisible although it could be brought out by etching with oak bark for an hour or two. So for this blade, I have forgone the buffing altogether and went to 7000 grit sandpaper with walnut oil (it is runnier than other edible oils, and does not stink like WD40). 7000 grit is the finest abrasive paper that I can easily buy but it still did not bring out the hamon very well. I could just about see it but it was still nearly impossible to make a photograph of. I etched it with oak bark, but I did not like how it looks so I removed the oak patina again with 7000 grit and I tried another buffing method, one that I have used in my rondel dagger project – very fine hematite.

I put some paper towel cuts in a receptacle with finely ground and sieved hematite dust and shook it a bit so some dust gets caught in the paper towels. Then I dusted the paper towels off to remove the coarser particles that still might be there. I smeared some dubbin on the blades and I tried buffing them manually with these hematite-primed paper towels with lengthwise strokes, using the spine of the blade as a guide. And that has resulted in a nice mirror-polished hardened edge and slightly foggy yet still mirror-polished soft spine, making the hamon really pop out. That way it was not only easily visible but I was also finally able to make a picture.

Hamon is the white line between the darker hardened edge and the lighter soft back.

I am not planning on making very many of these but it is nice to have the knowledge and skill how to do it. I think this blade is deserving of nice fittings so after I etch the logo and serial number, I will start seriously thinking about what kind of handle and sheath to make for it. I am done making blades for a few months however, I still did not dress all of those from last year’s overabladeance and I have eleven kitchen-knife blades in the tumbler now. Unfortunately, I have longer pauses between knife-making days than I like.

Sciencey Thoats About Tangs

Teh almighty YuTub algorithm has recommended this video to me:

Why military gear isn’t always a good idea…

And whilst I do agree with the title and the overall message of the video, I do have some objections to it. It is not an issue that can be distilled down to a universally true video quip.

First the agreements:

Military gear that is issued to grunts en masse needs to be essentially consumable. The grunts will lose it, steal it and/or destroy it with gross abuse and negligence on a regular basis. I read about conscripts in the Austrian army in WWI breaking their bayonets by opening cans. Stealing was a problem even in former Czechoslovakia, with the UTON even though that was not issued to every grunt but mainly to paratroopers. The knives disappeared regularly as the soldiers reported them “lost during exercise” even though they had to subsequently pay for them and everyone knew they took them home. Those knives are good, but they are not as excellent as some people think they are “military grade” is definitively not always a synonym for “high quality”.

Now the disagreements:

A good bushcraft knife needs not to have a full tang to be reliable. It is more complicated than that – rattail tangs were and are used in even swords and machetes to this very day and they are not useless. Puuko is a survival knife with hundreds of years long tradition for example. The above-mentioned UTON also has rattail tang, and one that does not go all the way through the handle at that, and still it is a knife that can withstand serious abuse. I have put some of my knives with similarly thin tangs through their paces, both full-length and half-length hidden tang and they withstood serious abuse just OK (although I was only using them as knives, see further). Hidden tang alone is not an issue, the overall construction and heat treatment are.

My biggest beef is with the presented “knife gets stuck and you try to wiggle it out”. Sorry, but if your knife gets stuck in something hard right up to the hilt, then you are probably an idiot for using the knife wrong. A knife is not, and should not be used as a pry bar. But let us say one were to use a knife for making firewood splinters from a log by batoning. That is a legitimate use for a bushcraft knife and it can get stuck that way. It happened to me with my working knife and I had to use serious force to get it out. However, if you try to “wiggle it out” by holding it solidly against the ground and pushing at the handle sideways, you are definitively an idiot for trying to remove it in the least effective and most dangerous way imaginable. Simply put, abuse like that shown in the video does not represent even remotely reasonable and appropriate use of a knife, not even a bushcraft knife that should be sturdy.

Another thing I would like to address is the handle material. It is shown to be natural leather rings and apparently, not overly compressed and not glued together or hardened. That is a problem because it is a soft material that can easily be compressed and give way for the tang to bend. A wooden handle – like on European medieval swords and daggers – significantly improves the resistance of the tang against bending. If the rings were glued together and hardened by hot wax or boiling or epoxy, it would improve the durability and resistance of the handle significantly too.

The thickness of the tang and the blade at the weakest point plays a far greater role than the width. The force needed to bend/break a flat profile rises linearly with width but exponentially with thickness. If you double the width of the tang, you double the force to bend/break it. But if you double the thickness of the tang, the force needed to bend/break it can rise approx ten times (I do not know exactly how much, the calculations are complicated and I cannot pretend to understand them). So a knife with a thickness of 3 mm and full width (~15 mm) tang will be about as strong as a knife with a thickness of 4 mm and 6 mm wide hidden tang.

A role also plays the heat treatment of the tang. A fully hardened tang will be stronger and more resistant to bending and will spring back when bent. But when bent beyond the plastic deformation, it will be more prone to permanent damage and/or catastrophic failure when straightened again as shown in the video. Unhardened tang – that is used throughout history for swords from Europe across Asia all the way to Japan I might add – is easier to bend but can subsequently be straightened again.

And lastly – anything will break if used wrongly or excessively abused. A knife is not bad because it cannot be used as a pry bar and a pry bar is not bad because you cannot cut cutlets with it. When I made the custom machete, I tested it by hitting a brick with it – but I still advised the customer not to do that.

Improvipairing mah Belt Grinder

Three weeks ago one of the idler wheels on my belt grinder gave up the ghost with a screech and a puff of smoke. I was wondering why everything was overheating lately – the belts, the platens, the hweels, teh hwole heveryting. As it turns out, one of the ball bearings on one of the idler wheels was probably a bit off and when a ball bearing starts to go bad, it gets only worse from there. I have impromptu repaired the wheel but I have decided to take this opportunity to rebuild and improve my belt grinder.

The first step on that path was buying a bunch of precision-cut aluminum tubing.

The only downside was that the ball bearings fit too well into these tubes, they could be inserted without any effort whatsoever. And I do not have a lathe to cut grooves for internal snap rings. So I have used stainless steel foil strips as shims for one ball bearing to press it firmly into the tubing with the other ball bearing only inserted and held in place with the nut in the assembly.

Here you see one of the new wheels before it was assembled on the belt grinder. Aluminum tube with one firmly pressed in ball bearing, steel spacer with a piece of cork to hold it somewhat centered (I have drilled the center of the cork a lot more later on so that the spacer is really loose. The cork is there only so the spacer does not wander too far off center when assembling/disassembling), and the second ball bearing.

I have made three such wheels, and over one I have pressed another aluminum tube to increase its diameter. That one I later fixed in my drill and with the help of my impromptu repaired belt grinder I gave that wheel a barrel-like profile. Because my old tracking wheel was too getting worn and I decided to completely rebuild the spanning arm.

Here you can see the right side of the spanning arm with the new spaning wheel. I won’t go into technimicical details. Here you have a second picture of the left side, it should be worth a thowsand words.

This is in part made from new materials. The downside of this assembly is that I had to weld a 30 mm M10 nut onto the arm. Which was not easy. To say that I suck at welding would be to grossly and immodestly overstate my abilities. When I die, the average welding ability of humanity will probably go ever so slightly up. But after a few botched attempts, I have managed to make welds that at least hold in place, even when they look completely craparooni.

The tracking wheel is on an M10 thread rod and thus can be moved left-right with the help of the upper handle. That is necessary to at least somewhat center the belt on the tracking wheel to avoid asymmetric wear of its surface, My previous assembly did not allow for this and as a result, the wheel got really worn on the left side only.

The second screw under that allows for slightly tilting the spanning arm left-right. That moves the belt slightly from left to right, allowing it to center on the platen. This was starting to be difficult with my previous arm, in part because the assembly was a bit too sensitive (short pivot point) and in part due to the asymmetrical wear on the tracking wheel.

I have used the improved belt grinder for a few hours and it seems to work well. When the current batch of knives is in the tumbler, I will coat the wheels with PVC plastic and perhaps start making some other attachments for the belt grinder.

Not a Masterpiece Sheathed

I have realized that I did not show this on Affinity, only on Instagram. With all that is going on, I haven’t done any actual work in my workshop for weeks now, but this one was finished months ago. In the end, I have decided to make a simple, unadorned sheath for my Not a Masterpiece knife. I decided to do that because I felt in the end that an overly decorated sheath would needlessly distract from the beautiful woodgrain in the handle. The striker and ferrocerium rod have simple stainless steel handles. The bronze caught patina, which was to be expected. It does require some maintenance to remain shiny.

The full set is for sale in the Knife Shoppe.

Le Workshoppe Rearangeé

I think I did not show you the inside of my workshop, except for the pieces visible around the various pieces of knives and machinery that I have shown in my crafting posts. And since I have totally overhauled (and cleaned) the shop these last few days, I have decided to give you a quick tour of the new layout. The workshop is a bit ad-hoc and furniture is made from mostly scraps.

So let’s start with the north wall, right behind the door.

On the right, you can see where my lathe is stored. I do not use it very often. Right next to the circuit breaker hangs my woodcutting helmet and fire extinguisher.

In the middle of that wall is a huge shelf packed with various things. At the very top are old baking trays, then a plastic tray with some pieces of graphite. Neither of those things I need often, thus the upper shelves. Then come abrasive cloths and papers sorted by grit. Under them are some cleaning, flammable and corrosive chemicals, and a little basket with magnets inside to collect steel dust. Next comes the shelf with various fixtures and jaws for the vice, follows shelf with knives in progress and knife templates, and a shelf with big massive pieces of steel and aluminium. The second shelf from the bottom is now filled with various lubricants and the lowest one currently occupies interesting-looking stones for suiseki and bonsai. The various plastic bottles are mostly sunflower oil for quenching and one bottle for cutting oil.

To the left of the shelf hangs a board with various chisels, scrapers, planers, and knives.

Leaning against the shelf are various wooden dowels, staves, bow staves, pipes, and long wooden prisms.

To the very left, you see the beginnings of my first workbench, made yonks ago. It is three meters long and would not fit in one picture.

Above and below the workbench are cupboards repurposed from kitchen renovations. In the corner, you can see two racks for thin metal profiles and pipes and the motor belongs to my tumbler. I have put it on this part of the workbench because it is somewhat inaccessible to work on and I have nowhere else to put the tumbler where it would not be in the way. I think I will be able to run it from there too, which is a plus.

The red vice is right under a light and in a spot where all the chisels, hammers, saws, rasps, and files are no more than one step away. On the cupboard right above it is also a thermometer so I know how warm/cold it is. Inside the cupboard above the vice are empty plastic containers for when I need them during work (like for example to sort screws into when disassembling/assembling something). In the drawer below it are small files and brushes, in the next drawer various pliers and shears, next wrenches, and the bottom drawer is filled with clamps.

The forge in the middle is there because it needs repairs – work for tomorrow. Under it is a place for storing the table saw when its not in use, a small stool to help me to reach the upper shelves, a bucket for steel dust, and a shop vacuum cleaner.

Above the forge is a shelf with various writing instruments, gomtry tools like compasses, rulers, curves, the most-often used screwdrivers, and a roll of paper kitchen towels. The papers hanging on that shelf are laminated steel heat-treating charts. I will add in near future data sheets for the steels that I use. Inside the cupboard are nails and on the very top shelf accessories for the greenhouses. Again, the upper shelf is occupied with things that are not used often.

Next, you can see my unbender, now permanently fixed to the workbench. I have also spent one more day making it sturdier and improving the design a bit. Next to it, at the end of the bench, is now permanently fixed my drill press. It is lifted slightly above the bench so I can reach under it with a small broom to tease out the metal chips that collect there. I have also put there a piece of PVC flooring to protect the workbench from dripping cutting oil. The tables hanging on the cupboard above it are a drill-speed table for various materials and a conversion table between trizact and grit abrasive ranking.

Below the drill are various small brooms and seldom-used cutting instruments. In the drawers are some abrasives for my handheld belt sander and some ppe, like gloves.

Above the drill press, right at the end of the picture, you can see a small shelf packed with old cookware for when I need to cook something that is not fit to do in the kitchen. Behind it is a small shelf filled with various drill bits.

Now we come to the south wall.

You have already seen my abrasive belt rack and my small heating stove. The basket and plastic bucket are for wood off-cuts. Normally they are not this full, but I did not need to heat the workshop for quite a long time now, obviously. The grey plastic trumpet is a vacuum attachment for collecting wood dust from the belt sander. The black barrel beside it with a similar metal trumpet is for collecting sparks and metal dust.

The green shelf to the left has buckets with various chemicals and abrasives on the top, some drums for the tumbler on the top shelf, and various metal offcuts on the rest.

Now we are reaching the newest addition to my workshop, one that has spurred the complete reorganization – the east wall with a new workbench.

On the right is now permanently affixed my small bandsaw. I hope that fixing it to the bench will reduce its vibrations and improve the lifespan of the saw bands, they were snapping rather quickly.

Below the bandsaw is a small cupboard with bonsaist equipment and various attachments for the belt sander.

The small brown shelf between the windows contains various screws, glues, popsicle sticks, bbq skewers, strings, wooden wedges, metal foils, and a first aid kit. On the right side (out of view except the baseball cap) hang various ppe, like face shield, earmuffs, respirator, and goggles. On the left side hang various bits of wire. Below it is a cordless drill and my two angle-grinders.

And on the left side of the bench is the belt sander. Originally it stood where the unbender is now, and it was a pain in the nether regions. It got in the way of reaching the cupboards and working on the drill press and it ate a lot of the workbench so some manual works were awkward or even impossible. Here it should not be in the way and there is enough space to the right side of it to build various attachments – I plan a lathe, a drum sander, and a disc sander.

The drawers in the grey cupboard below contain various measuring instruments, ball bearings, cork, popsicle sticks, and some other various stuff.

In the cupboard itself are boxes with assorted screws, spacers, springs, locks, keys, handles, and similar small diverse things that do not fit anywhere else.

Between the cupboard and the new workbench is about 9 cm space. I have thought about what to do with it and I have decided that it would be an ideal storage space for all of my knife- and tool-making steels, so I have put them there.

And on the very left of the picture you see where my various electric cables and gas burners hang.

That was the grand tour through my small workshop. Writing it took a lot longer than I have expected, I hope I did not bore you to death.

A Big Commission – Part 9 – Da Pictures

Today the customer has picked up his brand new machete. He was apparently delighted, at least he said so. His exact words were “This is much better quality than I have expected, especially the leatherwork.” So today I did not feel like a total waste of space. Here are some nice pictures for you to look at. I did not have to do too much post-processing after all.

A Big Commission – Part 8 – Photographing

I do not need to make nice pictures for the webshop for this one – unless the customer rejects it, which I hope he does not – but I do want to have nice pictures for myself, for Instagram and, of course, for Affinity. And since it was a nice sunny day today, I took my photography session outdoors. One advantage of that is the sunlight, one disadvantage of that is way too focused light. Shade has, of course, diffuse light, and whilst it is very bright on a cloudless sunny day, it is alas also of the wrong color for this thing and I did not want to spend too much time with corrections in either the camera or on the PC.

So I have rigged up a small thingamajig to make pictures in diffuse light whilst getting the benefit of direct sunlight’s color whilst getting it a bit diffuse. I will have to edit out an occasional ant or piece of debris though, so I am not entirely sure I have saved time in the post-production at all. Well…

A slightly overcast sky would be best but despite my valiant efforts, the weather still refuses to obey my commands. Mind you, if I could command the weather, I would not command a slight overcast right now, I would command a week of slow, drizzling rains and make the pictures indoors.

Pictures will be posted here and on Instagram after the customer picks up the item. I hope it will be tomorrow, but it might take a few weeks too, depending on circumstances.

A Big Commission – Part 7 – Missed Opportunity

AAAARGHHH! Amidiotextrordinaarggh!

Today I have sharpened the machete, thus de-facto finishing the commission. I have decided to test it in a way that poses minimal risks to the nice surface finish and still tests its cutting capabilities. By cutting milk boxes filled with water standing on a pole. That is a good way of testing an edge because a blunt blade just bats the box away from the pole, a sharp-ish one cuts partly through, tears the rest, and throws both pieces away, and a really sharp one sails through the box, the top falls off and the bottoms stays on the pole. A bad cutting technique may lead to a bad cut, but not even a perfect technique can lead to a good cut with a blunt blade. It does not test an edge’s durability – a well-sharpened bronze sword would perform well too.

I considered filming it and then I thought to myself “Nah, nothing interesting ever happens, waste of time”. Then I cut the first box and I immediately cursed my laziness and stupidity.

I cut the top of the box cleanly off, and it stayed on! I have cut dozens of these boxes when I was testing my own machete and this has never happened. And since there was enough of the box left for a second cut, I went on and cut it a second time.

And the blade sailed through like there was nothing there and both cut pieces stayed atop the bottom part. If my hair was long enough to grab and tear out, that is what I would be doing. A rare thing happens and I did not film it because I was lazy to go upstairs and set up my tripod.

Of course, I went upstairs for the tripod in a hope that I will be able to replicate it or at least get some interesting footage from the remaining three boxes that I had at hand. On two I got useless footage because I messed up my cutting technique. Probably nerves. Definitively nerves. On the third attempt, I did manage to get three clean cuts through the box, but the first two stayed on only because they remained connected on a minuscule (~1 mm) strip of paper – I was standing a tiny bit too far from it. After the third cut the top fell off but the bottom stayed on the pole so at least there’s that.

It is a wicked sharp blade, it cuts like a lightsaber. It will be a good tool. But I missed an opportunity for getting good advertising footage. Bigly.

A Big Commission – Part 6 – The Sharpenstone

Today I have made the last piece of the puzzle – a small whetstone for edge maintenance in the field. I expected it to take me two to three hours, it took me twice as much. Partly because it was the first time I was doing it so I did not really have a clear plan on how to properly proceed and what will work best, partly because I screwed up and I had to start all over with one part. But I think that if I were to make another, it would indeed be those two hours that I used for price calculation.

I started with a piece of native, strongly metamorphized phyllite. It has visible big garnet grains and it is very hard.

I cut a strip off with a diamond stone cutting wheel in my angle grinder. I have used that wheel also to roughly shape it and thin it.

For the second, fine layer, I have used a piece of old roofing shale. Those can sometimes be found around here on building sites and even in my garden.

Those are not native stones, they are the remnants of long demolished houses from before WW2. Initially, I wanted to use a different piece of local phyllite, less metamorphized, softer, and with finer grain, but I screwed up and it delaminated down the middle, becoming too thin. So I went for the shale for my second try because it is stronger and I wanted to be definitively done today.

Using five-minute epoxy, I glued both roughly shaped flat stones on a thin jatoba board, making a small stone popsicle.

After the epoxy cured, I shaped the outline, covered both outward faces with adhesive tape, and submerged it whole into linseed oil for a minute or so to soak the wood.

After that, I had to grind down the faces a bit again, it was just a bit too thick to fit into the pocket. I ground them down with the diamond wheel and then flatterooned them on granite stone with wet&dry carborundum abrasive paper on it.

Both phyllite and shale are soft enough so they can be shaped with abrasive cloth or paper, but hard enough themselves to abrade steel.

This is not a stone for serious sharpening work and I have told the customer so. Its abrasive action will be relatively mild compared to modern carborundum-based whetstones, even on the rougher phyllite side. But it should be excellent at maintaining an already sharpened blade and giving it an occasional touch-up during work. I have used pieces of phyllite or shale for exactly that, although those were stones found by the wayside, impromptu flattened and used out of necessity, not nicely crafted like this one.

Thus almost all work is finished – tomorrow I will sharpen the blade and make nice pictures to present here and on Instagram.

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